Description: Updates on the efforts of the Academy’s health practice council. its work groups and task forces, to educate health care policymakers on issues including health care reform, Medicare, loss ratios, premium review, reinsurance, benefit and eligibility changes, exchanges, and risk based capital.

Description: There is a wide range of literature on aging and health care. We sample this literature and find it fits into the subcategories of theoretical aging, medical significance of aging, treatment of the elderly, and resource allocation to the elderly. Themes are that financial arrangements can cause inefficient and ineffective care and that care guidelines need to developed specifically for the elderly rather than extrapolating guidelines for younger patients.

Description: Political figures and journalists have tended to blame deregulation and greed for the credit crisis. However, we would like to suggest that these were not the primary cause of the credit crisis. The real cause of the crisis was faulty regulation and arrogance. Flawed regulation in the over-reliance on complicated capital models and arrogance in believing that the complex mathematical formula in risk models overcame the limitations on input availability and enabled companies to capture returns that were greater than the cost of capital, have led Wall Street by creating CDOs and similar instruments to repackage risks and take out the systematic excess risk charges as profits, and have also allowed companies to run “prudently” on leverage ratios that were in hindsight over the limit.

Description: Mexico substituted its defined benefit system [IMSS] of the formal sector by a defined contribution system in 1997. The initial plan called for buying single premium annuities for the widows and disabled workers under the new system. In the first three years, this market came to occupy a significant part of the insurance sector. Then, the number of workers getting benefits started to fall dramatically. This is the abstract of a paper that shows that such a fall has been a direct result of how the IMSS authorizes the issuance of single premium annuities. The paper analyses the rationale behind such a dramatic change in policy, analyzes various possible scenarios of IMSS strategies, and examines the problem to see if it brings in any long-term benefits to IMSS.

Description: Feature article discussing combination products.

Description: Presidential address about changes in the actuarial world.

Description: This call for essays seeks to expand and complement the topic areas generated by the recently closed 2020 Living to 100 call for research papers (CFP). While many quality ideas were submitted, the CFP failed to generate many papers focusing on recent old age mortality and mortality improvement trends, and social issues on aging populations. With this in mind, the Society of Actuaries Committee on Living to 100 Research Symposia is issuing this call for essays to gather data, thoughts and opinions on these subject areas: • Recent trends in old age mortality and mortality improvement • How will society care for the elderly in the future and how does it differ from today? • How does society benefit from the elderly currently and how will it change in the future?

Description: This article discusses future benchmarks of Medicare and Medicare's rising costs and its relativity to the actuarial profession.

Description: High points of AcademyHealth’s LTC group policy seminar are discussed, including the relationship between post-acute care PAC and long-term care bundling PAC payments and the implications of research in this area of long-term care.